Eastern Europe

I first saw the Berlin Wall in March 1976, when I arrived for a semester's study at Stanford's overseas program there. As an international relations major interested in security affairs, I wanted to see the Cold War "up close and personal," and what better place to do it than the divided city that was the site of numerous Soviet-American confrontations?

It was an education, especially for a rather naive kid from California who had never been outside the United States. Foreigners could visit East Berlin relatively easily by then, yet crossing at Checkpoint Charlie was always a somewhat forbidding experience. The lines to cross were often long and tedious, the border guards sullen and arbitrary, and I always seemed to be the person they wanted to take into the back room for an extra search and a lot of questions.

The Wall itself was an ugly thing: a concrete scar across a once-great city, complete with barbed wire, guard towers, and checkpoints. It was both an iconic symbol of division but also something very real and tangible. It divided families, stifled dreams, and sometimes killed people. Some 5,000 people reportedly tried to get across the Wall while it stood, and a hundred or more died in the attempt.

Like other barriers that divide human beings, the Wall was also a confession of failure. Had the communist vision been a success, there would have been no need for Wall to keep people in. It was an education in itself to live in West Berlin and to visit the East; whatever the failings of liberal capitalism might be, it was palpably superior to life on the Other Side. West Berlin seemed a bit like Oz -- a vibrant, lively, and decidedly materialistic city, filled with cafes, stores, students, dogs (and a lot of elderly people too), but East Berlin was a bit like Dorothy's black-and-white Kansas: drab, monochromatic, and obviously much poorer. And by most accounts, East Germany worked better than the rest of the Soviet empire did.

What lessons do I draw from the Wall, its history, and its eventual destruction? Here are five.

First, although the Wall was an affront to human freedom, it also made a signal contribution to global stability. Berlin had been a flash point for international politics in 1948, 1958, and again in 1961, largely because Germany's fate remained uncertain so long as the DDR continued to lose people to the economic miracle in the West. As Marc Trachtenberg pointed out some years ago, the erection of the Wall completed the Cold War division of Europe and dampened security competition there significantly.

The second lesson is that containment worked. The Wall eventually came down because the Soviet Union collapsed without a superpower war, and Eastern Europe was liberated peacefully. As Kennan had foreseen, the Western system was in fact superior to the communist order on numerous dimensions, which meant that patient forbearance made more sense than a strategy of "rollback" or preventive war. We might have brought the wall down sooner by starting a big war, but fortunately leaders on both sides understood how foolish that would have been. There's a lesson there for those trigger-happy folks who think preventive action is the best way to deal with threats, even dangers that far less ominous than the Soviet Union was.

Third, if containment worked, the fall of the Berlin Wall was a vivid reminder that empires don't. The history of the 20th century is littered with the corpses of the Ottoman, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, British, French, Dutch, and Soviet empires -- none of whom could withstand the corrosive solvent of modern nationalism. Once the desire for national self-determination had the opportunity to express itself, the Soviet empire collapsed with remarkable swiftness.

Fourth, the destruction of the Wall-and indeed, the collapse of the entire Soviet order-teaches that revolutionary upheavals are nearly impossible to forecast with any precision. As Timur Kuran and others have shown, an individual's willingness to rebel is a form of private information that cannot be reliably known in advance, especially in an authoritarian society where repression is a real possibility. As a result, seemingly minor events can suddenly induce rapid contagion effects that even the participants themselves did not anticipate. Although a few observers recognized that the Soviet order was in trouble, hardly anyone believed it could collapse as quickly as it did or that Germany would reunify in a few years. The real lesson, however, is that although dramatic political change does occur from time to time, it rarely does so accordingly to anyone's timetable. The moral: Don't base your policy towards an adversary on the assumption that its rulers are on their last legs. Maybe they are, but maybe not, and nobody really knows.

Fifth and last, the fall of the Wall highlights the critical role of the individual in history. I'm a big believer in the importance of large structural forces -- the changing distribution of power, economic growth rates, demographic trends, and even evolving normative understandings -- but history sometimes turns on an individuals's ideas and initiatives. As I see it, it wasn't Reagan's saying "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" that led to it being broken into a million pieces (and then sold off, in a wonderful symbol of capitalist triumph), it was the fact that Gorbachev listened and was already thinking along similar lines. Had Andropov or Chernenko been younger or in better health, the Wall would have remained standing well into the 1990s, and we would not be celebrating anything today.

So as we congratulate ourselves for winning the Cold War and congratulate Germans on the destruction of a hated symbol of division, let us also reserve a word of thanks for those on the other side who also helped make that destruction possible.

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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to Moscow earlier this week, seeking Russian support for tighter sanctions on Iran. And what did she get for his efforts? A few nice photo ops, plus an unambiguous "nyet" from Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov.

I have a couple of questions.

Did she go there believing that she really would get a meaningful commitment for tighter sanctions from the Russians? Or did she know beforehand that she wasn't going to get anywhere, but felt she had to go through the motions anyway?

Frankly, I don't know which answer would worry me more. If it's the former, she's getting very bad advice from her Russia experts, who clearly have no idea how Russia's leaders perceive their own interests. If the latter, she has no business wasting time and effort on a lost cause and giving Lavrov the opportunity to score points by stiffing her in public. The Secretary of State of a great power shouldn't be flying off to foreign capitals with the diplomatic equivalent of a tin cup, pleading with them to comply with our wishes. You're supposed to wait until your assistants have got the deal more-or-less in place, and then you show up to make the final push and iron out the last sticky details. Either way, this just wasn't very smart diplomacy.

And let's not overlook the obvious possibility that Lavrov was right: right now isn't an opportune time to threaten Iran with more sanctions. The initial round of talks were encouraging (though there's still a long way to go), and brandishing threats is probably the best way to derail them before any additional progress is made. There are undoubtedly people in the United States (and Iran) who would like to see that happen, but I didn't think Hillary was one of them.

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Some semi-random thoughts on events that occurred since Friday.

1. I thought about posting something about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's most recent fit of Holocaust denial, but Juan Cole said everything I would have said with just the right tone of outrage. For what it's worth, I see this latest bit of bile as a sign of desperation on Ahmadinejad's part. The government faced renewed protests last week and seems to be somewhat at a loss for how to deal with its manifest unpopularity. As I noted during the initial round of demonstrations that followed the elections in June, Iran's leaders are increasingly out of touch with the broader population, and especially its younger elements. The clerics are a bunch of old men, and Ahmadinejad himself hardly in the bloom of youth at 53. By contrast, seventy percent of Iran's population is under 30 and was born after the 1980 revolution. Spouting foolish and hateful nonsense about the Holocaust isn't going to buy him much support at home or abroad, and I think it's a sign of waning legitimacy for the clerical regime as presently constituted. I just hope we don't do something stupid that allows him to rally nationalist feeling.

2. A reader wrote in and pointed out that I had incorrectly referred to "Czechoslovakia" in my post last week on Obama's missile defense decision.  My bad; I obviously should have said "Czech Republic." 

3. Why is Benjamin Netanyahu stiffing Obama and Mitchell, and why are they letting him? My answer to that question is in Sunday's Washington Post.

4. Matt Yglesias had a nice comment over the weekend about one of my pet peeves: the infamous "Munich analogy." His obvious but still very important point is that making Adolf Hitler's behavior your standard guide to foreign policy is foolish, because Hitlers are (fortunately) quite rare and you'll do a lot of stupid things when dealing with the overwhelming percentage of governments that aren't Nazi Germany and who aren't led by a genocidal monster.

I would only add a corollary comment: another reason Britain and France had trouble dealing with Hitler is that they were overcommitted in other areas (such as the Far East), and were also loathe to get too close to Stalin's Russia. The lesson (which those who constantly warn of another "Munich" never mention), is that you can get your country in just as much trouble by exaggerating threats and losing sight of strategic priorities as you can by failing to respond vigorously enough when a real challenge arises. For more on how Munich has been misused in policy debates, check out the late Ernest May's "Lessons" of the Past: the Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy (1973), and Christopher Layne's article "Security Studies and the Use of History: Neville Chamberlain's Grand Strategy Re-Visited." in the July 2008 issue of Security Studies.

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Welcoming Joe Biden to Tbilisi yesterday, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili declared that "in America, as anywhere on earth you can find lots of cynics and realpolitik followers. But in America, idealists ultimately run the show."

It's easy to understand why Saakashvili said this: he's desperate for American backing and that requires portraying Georgia as a beacon of democracy and freedom and making a none-too-subtle appeal to America’s commitment to defend these values everywhere. Why? Because it requires real creativity to divine a powerful strategic interest for an alliance with Georgia, especially when Washington is trying to get Russian cooperation on issues that clearly matter more, like Iran. It also requires overlooking Saakashvili's less-than-democratic behavior in the past, and the foolish war that he launched a year ago.

In any case, I hope Saakashvili also read the Times piece on U.S. policy in Central Asia, where human rights and other idealistic considerations are taking a back seat to strategic interests (i.e., the need for regional backing for the U.S. war in Afghanistan). It suggests that Saakashvili has got American foreign policy exactly backwards: yes, you can always find lots of "idealists" trying to get the United States to take on various philanthropic projects overseas, and of course U.S. leaders will always invoke cherished U.S. ideals when describing their policies. But in the end, realpolitik tends to win out, even if we don't like to say so too openly. To be sure, sometimes various special interest groups succeed in getting their pet projects onto the policy agenda, especially if they know how to work the American political system, and sometimes hubris leads U.S. leaders to take on grandiose plans to spread democracy or human rights, or other admittedly desirable things. Indeed, because the United States is so strong and comparatively secure, it's been able to take on more of these projects than anyone else, and probably more than it should. 

But when push comes to shove, U.S. leaders usually fall back on the less sentimental calculations of realpolitik, and they are rarely willing to risk much blood or treasure on behalf of purely moral concerns. I hope the Georgians keep that in mind.

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Some mildly good news: in a partially smart diplomatic move, the Obama administration has reportedly offered to trade the deployment of missile defenses in eastern Europe for active Russian support to convince Iran to give up its nuclear program. According to the NY Times story, the deal requires not just Russian support (presumably for more extensive economic sanctions), but rather depends on Iran "halting any efforts to build nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles."

This is a clever offer at first glance, because it gives up an expensive program that we don't need (missile defenses) in an attempt to get something we do want (better relations with Russia, and a deal with Iran on its nuclear program). Missile defense has been a costly chimera for decades, for two main reasons. First, any country sophisticated enough to put a nuclear warhead on a ballistic missile could probably develop low-cost countermeasures that would thwart our defenses. Second, any country that could develop missiles and a bomb small enough to mount on one wouldn't have much trouble smuggling a few weapons into Europe or the United States. This situation would actually be worse than a missile attack, because we might not even know where the attack had come from and thus would not be able to deter it by threatening retaliation. Spending billions on missile defenses is like locking the front door and leaving the back door wide open, with a sign inviting the burglars to come on in.

But the offer to Moscow has a down-side: it means that the fate of the missile defense program is actually in Iran's hands, not Moscow's, and the precise terms of the deal remain unclear. There's still no evidence that Iran actually has a nuclear weapons program (though obvious reasons to be suspicious) and little evidence that it will give up control of the full nuclear fuel cycle simply because the United States ramps up the diplomatic pressure or gets Russia and China to agree to stiffer sanctions. It's even less likely that Iran would give up its ballistic missile program. It might be possible to get a deal that addressed Iran’s regional security concerns (including our various efforts to foment regime change there) in exchange for tighter guarantees against their pursuit of an actual weapons capability, but that requires us to go in without big preconditions and without a lot of harsh rhetoric. Merely tightening the screws on Tehran hasn't worked in the past and is unlikely to work in the future. And if Russia does agree to help us, Iran still balks, and we go ahead and deploy the missile defenses in Eastern Europe anyway, Moscow is bound to feel betrayed.

Now for the bad news: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton apparently thinks diplomacy with Iran isn't going to work anyway. Perhaps she just misspoke (itself not a good sign), or perhaps this illustrates a point I've mentioned before: effective diplomacy requires lots of coordination, so that an initiative in one area isn't undermined by something you do or say somewhere else. Or maybe this incident suggests that the whole idea of talking to Iran is simply laying the diplomatic groundwork for a more direct military campaign later on. Thus far, the Obama administration hasn't strayed very far from the Bush administration's failed approach, which was in essence to tell Tehran "first, you do what we want, and then we'll talk to you about the things you care about." Obama does say we're willing to talk, but there's no sign that we are planning to make them a "yes-able" offer and his secretary of state apparently thinks direct diplomacy isn’t going to work.

This behavior is deeply puzzling, because a military strike on Iran is an unattractive option and we ought to be energetically looking for a diplomatic alternative. Beginning that process with a lot of tough talk and saying that we aren't expecting success doesn't strike me as a very promising way to start the process. Maybe it's just a coincidence that this sounds like the strategy new Iran point man Dennis Ross endorsed last summer, and not that different from the approach that the Israeli government is reportedly urging on Secretary Clinton during her visit to Jerusalem. As I've said before, if you think the debate on a military strike on Iran ended when Bush left office, think again.  

And while we're on the subject of Iran, here's a thoughtful column by Roger Cohen, warning against the simplistic stereotyping that has come to dominate most American discourse about the Islamic Republic. Cohen is neither naïve about Iran nor an advocate of appeasing the likes of Ahmadinejad, yet his nuanced discussion immediately drew the usual hail of criticism from neoconservative pundits, with one of them suggesting that he be fired.

I have a different question: why are Cohen's commentaries confined to the Herald Tribune and the Times blog? Why doesn't Cohen have a regular column on the Times op-ed page, especially now that William Kristol is gone? Cohen's views are balanced, he writes well, and he is often willing to challenge prevailing orthodoxies, which is what a good columnist should do.  If op-ed page editor Andrew Rosenthal wants to raise the level of discourse on his page he’d offer the guy a regular spot.

PIERRE-PHILIPPE MARCOU/AFP/Getty Images

Events elsewhere have kept me from paying much attention to the Russia-Ukraine gas dispute, but the realist in me has a couple of thoughts. It's obvious that Moscow is using Ukraine's dependence on Russian natural gas as a diplomatic weapon -- no surprise there -- but it's equally clear that Moscow's leverage is reduced by the EU's reliance on gas flowing through Ukrainian pipelines. Whenever Moscow tries to squeeze Kiev, Europe hollers and jumps in, and then the Russians have to lighten up in order to avoid a major fight with the Europeans (an important trading partner). But this problem will ease as soon as EU-Russian pipelines bypassing Ukraine are completed and Russia's ability to pressure Ukraine will perforce increase. As long as the rest of the EU is toasty warm in winter, they aren't going to care much about conditions in Kiev. So if I were Ukrainian, I'd think long and hard about where this one was headed.